I’ve written about contribution vs association before. Something interest to me is how people seem to think America is becoming fundamentally different than it was in the past.
To that I say, “Of course!” If you look at the population of the American colonies by year at the bottom of this, you’ll notice early on there were many decades where the number of people arriving was likely equal to the number of people already in America. These people all wanted to be contributors. They were leaving homelands and heading to a place they thought was full of opportunity and a better life.
I’m in the camp that an organization, or in this case a nation, will always thrive when people who want to contribute something significant are let in not because of who they are, or what their background is, but because of their willingness to do what they can to make things better.
Raising the amount of people who want to contribute and skewing the contributors-to-associators ratio higher is what great leaders do. It is what America is missing as a nation currently.
American Colonies Population by Decade
1610: 350
1620: 2,302
1630: 4,646
1640: 26,634
1650: 50,368
1660: 75,058
1670: 111,935
1680: 151,507
1690: 210,372
1700: 250,888
1710: 331,711
1720: 466,185
1730: 629,445
1740: 905,563
1750: 1,170,760
1760: 1,593,625
1770: 2,148,076
1780: 2,780, 369
1790: 3,929,214
1800: 5,308,483
1810: 7,239,881
1820: 9,638,453
1830: 12,866,020
1840: 17,069,453
1850: 23,191,876
1860: 31,443,321
1870: 38,558,371
1880: 50,189,209
1890: 62,979,766
1900: 76,212,168
1910: 92,228,496
1920: 106,021,537
1930: 123,202,624
1940: 132,164,569
1950: 151,325,798
1960: 179,323,175
1970: 203,302,031
1980: 226,542,199
1990: 248,709,873
2000: 281,421,906
2010: 307,745,538
2017: 323,148,586
None of this is Right 